Family Research Council (FRC) was a participant or observer in the following events:

Conservative Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell, who speaks out against the anti-gay rhetoric of the Westboro Baptist Church. [Source: New York Times]People from the left and right of the social and political spectrum join in condemning the actions of the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church (WBC—see November 27, 1955 and After) during its protest at the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a gay man who was beaten to death a month earlier (see October 9, 1998 and After and October 14, 1998). The Reverend Jerry Falwell, a far-right Christian evangelist, says of the WBC’s protest, “I found it almost impossible to believe that human beings could be so brutal and vicious to a hurting family.” Of the WBC’s leader, Fred Phelps, he says, “He’s a first-class nut.” Phelps says he is proud to be labeled as such by Falwell because “[i]t means I’m preaching the truth.” Phelps then labels Falwell a “Judas” and says WBC members will picket Falwell’s church in Lynchburg, Virginia. Robert H. Knight of the conservative Family Research Council says he asked Phelps to call off the church’s protests against gays (see June 1991 and After) a year ago, and says he told Phelps that his actions “misconstrue… the message of Christ, which was one of love.” Arne Owens of the Christian Coalition says that anti-gay Christian organizations oppose the homosexual lifestyle while loving gays and lesbians: “You must be loving toward all human beings while recognizing the role of sin in the world.” But Cathy Renna of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) says that Phelps only expresses the hatred other anti-gay groups feel but do not so bluntly demonstrate. The Traditional Values Coalition, a conservative lobbying group, joins the Christian Coalition and other anti-gay organization in accusing GLAAD and other gay rights groups of capitalizing on Shepard’s murder for their own purposes, a charge Renna calls ludicrous. She says that Shepard’s friends “told me that Matthew would have wanted something good to come out of this. If [a murder] energizes and makes us fight to educate people about the kind of violence lesbians and gays face every day, that’s not using Matthew.” Instead, she says, groups like the Christian Coalition are using Phelps to promote their agenda: “They can point to him and say: ‘He’s a bad guy. We’re compassionate.’” For his part, Phelps says his organization brought “a little sanity” to Shepard’s funeral, and claims it was “the homosexuals” who “turned it into a Cecil B. DeMille propaganda mill.” [Associated Press, 11/24/1998]

Family Research Council logo. [Source: Mediamouse (.org)]The Family Research Council (FRC), a Christian conservative organization headed by the Reverend James Dobson, authorizes an advertisement linking Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD) to Saddam Hussein. The ad is triggered by Daschle’s opposition to the Bush administration’s desire to drill for oil in the protected Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). The ad is released by American Renewal, the lobbying wing of the FRC headed by Richard Lessner, who formerly headed the editorial page staff at the Manchester Union Leader. In a press release announcing the ad, Lessner asks: “What do Saddam Hussein and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle have in common? Neither man wants America to drill for oil in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” It juxtaposes photos of Daschle and Hussein, and charges that American buys 725,000 barrels of oil a day from Hussein because Daschle “won’t let America drill for oil at home.” Daschle spokesman Doug Hattaway calls the ad “an outrageous, extremist attack at a time when the nation is unified.” Lessner calls the ad an example of “telling the truth” necessitating “tough talk.” Washington Post pundit Dana Milbank says the ad has all “the subtlety of a Scud missile.” [Washington Post, 11/9/2001]

The Family Research Council, an organization of religious and social conservatives, sends a letter to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) protesting a department Web site that for six years has provided the public with information about gay-related health issues. Two weeks later, the entire Web site disappears. [Savage, 2007, pp. 106]

According to media reports, the Obama administration intends to reverse the “right of conscience rule,” formally called the Provider Refusal Rule, for health care workers enacted by President Bush in the last weeks of his term. In December 2008, Bush issued an executive order allowing health care workers to deny care based on their personal beliefs. The order was issued to target doctors and nurses who do not want to provide abortions, even if they work in a facility that offers abortions to clients. Specifically, the rule denies Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) funding to institutions that do not allow workers to refuse care that goes against their beliefs. Now the Obama administration says President Obama will override that order. Seven states have already challenged the rule, claiming it sacrifices the health of patients in order to satisfy the religious or moral beliefs of medical personnel. The American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology has reported cases such as that of a Virginia mother of two who became pregnant because she was denied emergency contraception; in Texas, the group said, a rape victim had her prescription for emergency contraception rejected by a pharmacist. Obama has already overturned a ban on US funding for international aid groups that provide abortion services. However, administration officials say the administration may consider a rule that would clarify what health care workers can reasonably refuse. An HHS spokesman says: “We recognize and understand that some providers have objections to providing abortions. But we do not want to impose new limitations on services that would allow providers to refuse to provide to women and their families services like family planning and contraception that would actually help prevent the need for an abortion in the first place.” Dr. Suzanne Poppema of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health praises Obama “for placing good health care above ideological demands,” and says: “Physicians across the country were outraged when the Bush administration, in its final days, limited women’s access to reproductive health care. Hundreds of doctors protested these midnight regulations and urged President Obama to repeal them quickly. We are thrilled that President Obama took the first steps today to ensure that our patients’ health is once again protected.” Tony Perkins of the anti-abortion Family Research Council (FRC) counters: “Protecting the right of all health care providers to make professional judgments based on moral convictions and ethical standards is foundational to federal law and is necessary to ensure that access to health care is not diminished, which will occur if health care workers are forced out of their jobs because of their ethical stances. President Obama’s intention to change the language of these protections would result in the government becoming the conscience and not the individual. It is a person’s right to exercise their moral judgment, not the government’s to decide it for them.” [Chicago Tribune, 2/27/2009; CNN, 2/27/2009; New York Times, 2/27/2009] The liberal Center for American Progress (CAP) writes in April 2009: “Conservatives have criticized the Obama administration for infringing upon the conscience of health care professionals and ‘forcing’ them to provide abortion services.… Yet this assertion could not be further from the truth. President Obama’s proposal to rescind Bush’s last-minute rule restores the pre-existing compromise established through decades of debate.” CAP notes that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act disallows employers from firing or harassing workers who decline to fulfill assigned tasks due to moral or religious objections. “Obama’s proposal to rescind the Bush ‘conscience’ rule simply restores the prior balance that existed on matters of conscience,” CAP concludes. “It once again guides the health care system to value the consciences of health care providers and patients.” [Jessica Arons and Sarah Dreier, 4/28/2009] However, for reasons never made publicly clear, the Obama administration will never actually rescind the order. It is possible that Obama or HHS officials bow to pressure from a number of organizations such as the FRC and the Christian Medical Association, which have continually pressured the administration not to rescind the order. [Fox News, 4/8/2009; Time, 2/4/2010; Megan Sullivan, 7/13/2010]

William F. Jasper. [Source: John Birch Society]William F. Jasper, a senior member of the anti-Communist, implicitly racist John Birch Society (JBS—see March 10, 1961 and December 2011) and the senior editor of its New American magazine, protests that the “left-wing media” are attempting to use the arrests of nine far-right militia members in the Midwest (see March 27-30, 2010) “to broadly smear all political conservatives, constitutionalists, tea party activists, and opponents of President Obama’s health care as ‘extremist’ and ‘anti-government.’” Jasper derides the media’s reliance on experts from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC—see March 2, 2010) for understanding and analysis of the Michigan Hutaree and other militia groups. “[P]redictably,” he writes, “the SPLC has been only too ready to spin the story as proof of their contention that the greatest danger to our republic is ‘anti-government’ extremism by ‘right-wing’ organizations the SPLC likes to identify as ‘hate groups.’” Jasper says that groups like the JBS and the Hutaree are “falsely label[ed] as being racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-government, anti-immigrant, nativist, extremist, hate-promoting, and intolerant.” He writes that the SPLC routinely conflates right-wing “constitutionalist” or “patriot” groups with “genuine hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations, or the Nazi Party” in an attempt “to smear and discredit them by false association.” He then attacks the SPLC as “a principal front for the militant homosexual lobby” and a strong opponent of the “Christian Right,” accusing it of “smear[ing] such respected Christian and pro-family organizations as Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, the late Rev. D. James Kennedy’s Coral Ridge Ministries/Center for Reclaiming America, and Beverly LaHaye’s Concerned Women for America, as well as the Alliance Defense Fund, the American Family Association, the Chalcedon Foundation, American Vision, the Christian Action Network, the Family Research Council, Summit Ministries, and the Traditional Values Coalition.” He quotes right-wing attorney Matt Barber, the director of Liberty Counsel, as calling the SPLC a “bully” organization, and cites Barber as saying that a citation by the SPLC “confers a badge of honor upon every legitimate Christian and conservative organization it so disingenuously mislabels ‘hate group.’ It’s a tacit admission by the SPLC that these groups represent a political threat; that their activities undermine the SPLC’s not-so-thinly-veiled, left-wing agenda.” And he quotes far-left columnist Alexander Cockburn, an avowed Marxist, as labeling the SPLC a “hatemongering” organization. In truth, Jasper claims, it is the SPLC and not the groups it covers that is a true “hate group” responsible for police and other law enforcement officials unfairly pursuing and even endangering what he calls innocent citizens and organizations exercising their constitutional rights to protest against their government. Jasper takes particular umbrage at a Wisconsin news report that cited the SPLC’s identification of a JBS chapter in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, as a “patriot” group. The news report quoted SPLC official Heidi Beirich as calling the JBS “one of the number one organizations that provide the conspiracy theories that fuel the anti-government world.” He also notes that the news report quoted JBS chief Arthur Thompson as admitting that while many militia groups rely on JBS literature and Web sites for their information, “that doesn’t mean we support their policies of how they want to implement what they believe in. We believe in a lot of things but we don’t believe in coercion or violence to promote what we believe in.” The JBS, Jasper writes, has “promot[ed] freedom” for over 50 years, and calls it “a patriotic, educational organization dedicated to restoring and preserving limited, constitutional government, free enterprise, and Christian-style civilization.” The JBS “has always opposed racism, anti-Semitism, communism, socialism, fascism, and Nazism,” Jasper concludes, though he acknowledges that his claim “has not stopped liberal-left critics from falsely accusing the Society of these things. In so doing these critics have adopted the tactics developed by the Communist Party of smearing their opponents rather than honestly debating them on the issues.” [John Birch Society, 6/3/2008; New American, 4/26/2010]

The CPAC 2012 logo. The small print at the bottom reads, ‘A project of the American Conservative Union.’ [Source: CPAC (.org)]The annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) event, featuring Republican presidential contenders Mitt Romney (R-MA), Newt Gingrich (R-GA), and Rick Santorum (R-PA), also features two noted white supremacists, Peter Brimelow and Robert Vandervoort, as headlined participants. Brimelow, the owner of the anti-immigration, anti-Semitic, and white supremacist Web site VDare.com (see November 26, 2004 and May 2008), is part of a panel discussion titled “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the Pursuit of Diversity is Weakening the American Identity.” Vandervoort, who writes for the anti-immigrant, white supremacist Web site ProEnglish.com and has ties with the supremacist groups American Renaissance (see July 15, 2002 and September 1995) and the Council of Conservative Citizens (see January 23, 2005, June 2, 2009, and April 16, 2011), speaks on a panel discussion about “High Fences, Wide Gates: States vs. the Feds, the Rule of Law, and American Identity.” Vandervoort also takes part in the “multiculturalism” panel discussion with Brimelow. [Little Green Footballs, 2/8/2012; Newsone, 2/9/2012; Conservative Political Action Conference, 2/9/2012 ] Other Republicans speaking at the conference include Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN). CPAC also hosts groups such as the anti-gay Family Research Council and the segregationist Youth for Western Civilization. CPAC denied permission for the gay conservative group GOProud to participate in the event, citing the group’s “behavior and attitude” as its reason for denying access. Michael Keegan, the president of the liberal organization People for the American Way (PFAW), issued a statement calling on Romney, Santorum, and Gingrich to “speak out” against Brimelow and Vandevoort’s participation, and adding, “It’s shocking that the CPAC would provide a platform for someone like Brimelow.” [Right Wing Watch, 2/8/2012] CPAC’s main organizer, the American Conservative Union (ACU), refused to heed calls by Keegan and others to repudiate Brimelow and Vandervoort, instead issuing the following oblique statement through spokeswoman Kristy Campbell: “CPAC is proud to have more than 150 sponsors and exhibitors this year. This panel was not organized by the ACU, and specific questions on the event, content, or speakers should be directed to the sponsoring organization. Cosponsors and affiliated events do not necessarily represent the opinions of the American Conservative Union.” [Buzzfeed, 2/8/2012] Conservative blogger Charles Johnson, who in recent years has regularly protested against what he perceives as the increasing prominence of racism on the American political right, writes: “I admit, this one kind of shocks me, and it’s not easy to do that any more. I knew the right wing had gone bug-eyed loony, but this is way beyond the usual xenophobia and paranoid bigotry; this is open white nationalism at the Republican right’s premier high-profile conference, in an election year. Stunning. Masks are dropping all over Wingnutland.” [Little Green Footballs, 2/8/2012] During the panel on multiculturalism, Brimelow and Vandervoort are joined by Representative Steve King (R-IA) in claiming that America’s “identity” is being “weakened” by its acceptance of minority citizens and their cultural influence. Vandervoort claims that “leftist thugs” have attempted to prevent him from taking part in the event as part of their larger attempt to “shut down freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.” Brimelow calls multiculturalism and bilingualism “diseases” that are infecting American society as they work to empower minorities and “suppress traditional” (i.e. white) citizens. Multiculturalism and bilingualism are, he says, a “ferocious attack on the working class.” King discusses his bill that would make English the official language of the United States. King praises Brimelow, telling him that he has “read your books” and says to the gathered onlookers that Brimelow “eloquently wrote about the balkanization of America.” [Right Wing Watch, 2/9/2012] The 2011 CPAC event welcomed the far-right, implicitly racist John Birch Society as one of its sponsors (see April 19, 2010 and December 2011). That year, some conference participants stated their opposition to having white supremacists taking part in the event, opposition that apparently was not raised this year. And in 2011, Joseph Farah, the publisher of WorldNetDaily, was not part of CPAC because organizers did not want him discussing his questions about President Obama’s citizenship (see May 18, 2009 and March 24, 2011). This year, Farah is allowed to return.” [MaddowBlog, 2/9/2012]

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